The Black Rod

  Two cases of blatant fake news in the Winnipeg mainstream media this week serve as prime examples of why consumers continue to abandon the MSM by the thousands. The most egregious is the smear campaign being conducted in the Manitoba Legislature by the NDP and Liberals against Kevin Klein, the Progressive Conservative candidate in the upcoming Kirkfield Park by-election. The smear was led by MLA Dougald Lamont, who has officially donned the crown as the slimiest politician in the province. Lamont is the "leader" of a rump group of 3 MLA's who sit in the far back benches under the banner of the Liberal Party of Manitoba, though they have no chance of ever becoming the government, and can't even elect enough members to qualify as a legitimate 'party' in the Legislature. Lamont has been attacking Klein for working with Peter Nygaard, the "disgraced fashion mogul" as the Winnipeg Free Press labels him. Nygaard is in jail in Toronto awaiting trial on...

  There is an editor in chief of daily news for CBC News. He is Brodie Fenlon, and he has a blog. Lately he has been whining about the lack of trust from the public in mainstream news outlets. Recently he lamented about the findings of the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual study of opinion regarding trust in business, government, media and NGOs. The Edelman report found that 49 percent of Canadians agreed "that journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations." And 52 percent agreed that "most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position that with informing the public." WHYYYYYYYYYYY????  he blubbered. Well, Mr. Fenlon, meet Carol Sanders. On Tuesday Sanders was responsible for  the most shameful example of "new journalism" you could ask for . She generated a story smearing the Freedom Mandate protestors at the Legislature without re...

There's a new challenger in town for the title of Fake News Champion. Stand aside Dan Lett, columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and current holder of the belt. Your new competition is your colleague, Ryan Thorpe, who's been described by his alma mater as an  "investigative reporter who covers crime for the daily newspaper." This past Saturday Thorpe was responsible for a three-page spread headlined "SAFETY FIRST, everything else last." The thrust of the article is that the budget for policing (and the fire department and paramedics, but mainly the police) takes such a big bite (nearly half) out of the budget there's hardly anything left for other services. This Saturday he had a follow-up story arguing that Winnipeg spends too much money on police salaries when only 34 percent of reported crimes are cleared. To bolster his argument, Thorpe's both stories cited the work of Kevin Walby, "a criminologist and associate professor at the University ...

When it comes to Fake News, nobody can match Dan Lett, the "political columnist" for the Winnipeg Free Press. But he surpassed himself last Friday when he concocted a story accusing Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister of hiring a private investigator to "dig up dirt on NDP leader Wab Kinew" prior to the 2019 provincial election. The story was based on those apocryphal anonymous "sources" who, of course, "have asked not to be named for fear of reprisal." Given that Lett has been a shill for the NDP for months (more on that soon), coordinating his anti-Pallister columns with NDP political attacks, its not hard to figure out who his "sources" are. The Page One news story, carried under Lett's name with no mention of being 'opinion', continued on the jump page where, if one read that far, in paragraph 20 of the 28 paragraph story Lett conceded that the PI was actually a researcher hired to pour through the legal records of Kinew...

When selecting a Newsmaker of the Year for 2018, the Winnipeg Free Press delegated the job to their readers.  Apparently the newspaper has nobody on staff with enough news sense to be capable of sifting through the year's stories to determine who had the biggest influence on Manitobans. So the FP went with the readers' choice---Tina Fontaine, who was described as the "heartbreaking catalyst for change." The fact that she had been dead for four years was not a strike against her. It was the death of the fragile 15-year-old girl whose body was discarded in a blanket in the Red River that made her what she is today -- an icon of the missing and murdered aboriginal women movement. "... Tina's story was a primary driving force behind a public inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, which the federal government granted in 2016," wrote Niigaan Sinclair, the author of the Newsmaker 2018 story. Sinclair normally writes an opinion co...

Sometimes stories for The Black Rod get loaded and ready to go, only to be sidetracked by server problems. Since timing is everything, unless the problem is solved quickly, the stories get dumped. But sometimes, we get lucky.  And we can salvage one of those stories. Like today.   Winnipeg columnist Dan Lett's latest screed against Donald Trump  http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/twitter-changing-how-game-of-politics-is-played-410801865.html   ended with this snippet of Lett wisdom: "There is so much fake news floating around the interweb that it is becoming more and more difficult to discern real, professionally produced news from that which seeks to debase and derail democratic exercises and institutions." We can't resist.   Back in November we addressed another of Lett's hare-brained columns but he's now made what we wrote more relevant than ever: ----------------------- (originally written Nov. 20, 2016) Amazing. Simply ...